In recent years, mobile communication services have expanded and increased in popularity, around the world. Many mobile communication networks offer wireless mobile communication service for voice calls, mobile messaging services (e.g. text and/or multimedia) and data communications. The data services, for example, enable surfing the world wide web, e.g. via a browser. Businesses have utilized these advanced mobile communication services to provide proximity services to mobile devices. In a proximity service, the proximity service provider identifies users of mobile devices that are within proximity of a service point (e.g., a retail location or a content server), and provides services (e.g., notify the address of the retail location or transmit content) to the users within the proximity. These proximity services may take various forms, such as providing promotional offers that the users of the mobile devices may take advantage of that are being offered nearby, or notifying the users that location specific services (e.g., WiFi hotspot service) are available nearby.
A number of different business models have been proposed or developed for providing the proximity services, which have led to several different technical approaches. For example, the user may operate his or her mobile device to execute an application specifically associated with a proximity service provider and provide his or her current location information through the application. In response to the user-provided location information, the proximity service provider provides the proximity services to the user, e.g. by sending information or offers about nearby available services from a server to the mobile device for presentation via the proximity application and the mobile device. This approach requires that the user actively opens the proximity application and provides his or her current location information each time the user moves to a different place. The user may find constantly providing the current location information inconvenient, or may forget to provide the latest location information. In addition, since communication is made between the mobile device and the proximity service provider in a one-to-one basis, the mobile communication networks are used only as a pipeline, and the proximity service providers may not fully utilize the technology and knowledge regarding the mobile devices, that are available from operators of the networks.
Hence, there is still room for further improvement to technology for providing proximity services to mobile devices, so as to provide proximity services that are more convenient to the mobile device users and that takes advantage of the technologies and knowledge regarding the mobile devices available from an operator of the mobile communication network.